[Trevor Bradley]

OK, enough teasing in the developer forums, let me give you guys an idea what I've been working on this past month... Go easy on me... this game is not yet complete and I still have a lot of work to do on the UI...



The game I'm working on has the present working title of "Galactic Artifact". Without an Pandora on hand for development, in reality it's a Windows/Linux game I hope to port to the Pandora.

The game is a non-combat, real time space exploration game. That galaxy you see has about 40,000,000 uniquely named stars divided into 10,000,000 sectors of space. (The real galaxy has 100 billion stars, but mine is just a flat cross section). You can zoom in to see individual stars, or out to see the galaxy as a whole. The galaxy is filled with approximately 4.5 million artifacts, each with a unique name, type and value.

The goal of the game is to find a single specific "prize" artifact in as little time possible. To do this, you wander the galaxy, collecting the artifacts you find and selling them to interested parties of "Ancients", "Industrialists", or "Futurists" who will either give you cash for the artifact, or information about where this "prize" artifact can be located. The game is a "powers of two" game; you bisect the galaxy over and over again until all that's left over is a small region of space containing the artifact you're looking for.

It's not easy though. Early in the game you ship is too slow, too small and too inefficient to visit any but the nearest stars. You have to ugprade your ship with cash from sold artifacts to be able to travel far across the galaxy.

The game is a multiplayer game, and you'll be racing against opponents in the same space for the same artifact. If you can afford it, you can upgrade your ships computer to keep track on their whereabouts or even decrypt their private transmissions and steal their information. There will be a single player version as well.

More Screenshots:
Screenshot of development
Talking to Aliens
Exploring sectors

At the moment a game takes about 45 minutes for an unskilled player on "Hard", about 15 minutes for a skilled player. On "Easy" with no fuel or ship limitations you can usually win within 20 minutes. My wife and 8 and 11 year old kids all seem to enjoy playing the game

I actually have a working game right now, but it's still very unpolished and many things I want to finalize are missing. The fonts I'm using right now are SDL_gfx defaults (I'll be moving to SDL_ttf soon), the whole right side of the screen will have graphics improvements, and at least two dozen other major things I want to implement or clean up. I have serious doubts I'll be able to get the frame rate down to a decent level for the Pandora. But I have been keeping the lid on this for a while and thought I'd share how far I've gotten.

Once things are more polished I'll likely share an alpha of the game here. Even if I can't get this working with a decent frame rate on Pandora, I am going to release it even if it's just a Windows/Linux desktop application.

[Gregor Richards]

License?

[Trevor Bradley]

License?

It will be free. Might be open source too, haven't made up my mind.

[GunPei2X]

That sounds very cool, Trevor.

[Tripmonkey_uk]

Looks great
As much as I love violent games (beat'em ups etc.), I can still appreciate something like this and look forward to it being released.
Any plans of adding an AI opponent with it only being multi-player?

[PlopperZ]

This game sounds amazing! Really hoping you'll get it running on the Pandora.
*Blogged*

Any plans of adding an AI opponent with it only being multi-player?

....Or even just a "race against the clock" mode?

EDIT: Just so I have the right idea, will this be somewhat similar to Ur-Quan Masters/ Star Control II?

This post has been edited by PlopperZ: 09 January 2009 - 08:59 PM

[cbox]

My God, it's full of stars!

[Tobriand]

That sounds awesome, and exactly the sort of thing I find extremely fun. Indiana Skywalker meets Elite can't make a bad game, I think!

Any plans for pirates to play a role, or are you going with the idea that space is so damn vast the chances of meeting a pirate in the same sector are negligible?

[stustaff]

WOW massive and very impressive, got me interested.

BUT WAIT!
How did you come up with 40,000,000 uniquely named stars???

a1, a2...b1,b2....c1.....aa1, ab1, ac1... etc etc ???

[dockthepod]

Very cool. Best of luck with this.

[Wolfsclaw]

Wow thats a damn original game, it sounds superb.
If Multiplayer means Wifi Multiplayer, I can imagine myself playing for hours with it. Or maybe I will already do that in singleplayer mode...

[Bramrash]

Looks awesomme, and can I add another vote for pirates?

Can't wait to try it out.

[cosurgi]

Is it possible to configure bigger font? I have a good sight, so there's no reason to make it worse by using it to the extremes. (I prefer to use it to the extremes when looking at moon or venus through a telescope )

[Esn]

I can't quite visualize it in my head, but it does sound interesting. It would be cool if it was somewhat like Ur-Quan Masters or Starflight.

I might be interested in painting some aliens, if you would ever need that sort of thing.

[Trevor Bradley]

Awesome, glad to get some responses!

Here's some answers back...

AI multiplayer is going to be a bit difficult. There's a lot of tricky decision making on where to go next. The algorithms for displaying "excluded" areas of the galaxy are tricky enough, getting an AI to figure out where to go would be even harder. It is possible though. A race against the clock is definitely possible. Presently the clock ticks upwards and gives a final time at the end of the game, there's no reason why it can't tick down. Multiplayer DEFINITELY means Wifi. It's why I've been antsy about the Pandora's Wifi antenna.

Pirates: I hadn't even considered this. The only other ships I was think about were opponents and a tow truck to deliver fuel to ships in need. I'll give this some serious thought. Any ideas what the pirates would actually do? Steal cargo from ships that were lured to a star system perhaps?

Comparisons to Star Control II: This game is very much inspired by Star Control II/Ur Quan masters, one of my favourite games of all time (a side shout out to Senor Quack for porting UQM to GP2X). One of the very first things I implemented was the "Galaxy Zoom", which smoothly slides from one scale to another. Basically this game is like traveling through hyperspace a lot. I had actually started implementation of a planetary system view, where you actually had to find the planet or moon in a star system, but it totally wrecked the game flow. A full galaxy with planets and moons will have to wait for another game.

Font size: The fonts right now suck. I'm using the default fonts in SDL_gfx, and they're not the prettiest. I actually asked about font size in the dev forums a few weeks back. The very smallest fonts on the screen right now, SDL_gfx's default 8x8 font, in the overview area (star types, etc) and the words "minimap" and "cargo" will NOT be used. It's totally unreadable on a screen the size and resolution of the Pandora. They'll be replaced with graphics. The other fonts, the 9x15B font on the Alien Interface screen likely will be the smallest used. All that being said there's still a fair amount to cram in there. I've been told the smallest font I plan on using is still readable, but I'll have to check myself. My eyesight isn't the best either and if it's not readable I'll have to go with something else. I'm hoping to move to SDL_ttf and get different fonts, but readability is a top concern.

Uniquely named stars (and artifacts) isn't as hard as it sounds. There are on the order of 100,000,000 stars (10^8). My star names are all four syllables presently of the form CONSONANT VOWEL. 20 consonants (excluding q) and 5 vowels give 100 combinations per syllable, four syllables give 10^8 combinations. It was a hokey interim solution at first, but it's kind of growing on me. The consonant/vowel thing gives the names a bit of a Japanese sound. There's a possibility of expanding the syllables to something else, but the names will be longer. The artifacts are similar... three types of artifacts, three words to describe (*adjective* *noun* of the *noun*)... I need 143 words for each field... so 143^3 unique artifact names. Multiply that all by 3 for each artifact. My wife has been working on the 9*143 descriptive nouns/adjectives and is enjoying the job... something creative to think of when she gets bored at work.

Painting Aliens: I *DO* need help with this. I was trying to figure out how to do it myself as I'm not too artistically inclined. Basically I need frames similar to an animated gif at 160x160... just a few to create an illusion of motion (and perhaps better yet if only one portion of the frame is animated like a mouth, as Blitting animation takes up valuable CPU cycles!). The thing is, I'm not yet convinced the aliens should actually be aliens! I'm thinking they may be different factions of humans who have colonized the galaxy.. The Ancients are interested in ancient artifacts, but are also computer experts (need advanced computers to detect non metallic-futuristic things from afar). The industrialists pine for the days when you could travel far and wide as you want, and specialize in faster ships with bigger fuel tanks (think SUVs). The futurists are the hippy eco-car driving types who improve fuel efficiency and miniaturize cargo space. As for painting other things, my cargo icons presently stink, and I need to work on some graphical "framework" for the right hand side of the screen... a frame for cargo items, new cargo icons, a better frame for the ship interface (fuel, cash, ugprades) that I can draw on, pictures of stars, animations on zooming into stars, animations of aliens... some sort of graphic framework for the zoomed out sector overview... I think that's the list.

You guys are showing a lot of enthusiasm... I'm thinking I'm going to get a good reception even if the game is in an unfinished and (slightly) buggy state. If the game was more unfinished I would fear that the negative reviews would drain my enthusiasm for working on the thing.. but everything here is driving me forward!

Lemme whip up a Windows/Linux shared zip file and share. Better to get the cool ideas now that totally smash the architecture of what I'm doing than later when I can't change it. Should be up in an hour or so.